It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python’s kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience.
Erdrich’s magnificent story collection features a range of characters – a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, school teachers and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.
Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe, these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.
Louise Erdrich a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
Read: Love of My Days, The New Yorker
First line: This happened on the table-flat plains before most farms had telephones. So these incidents came about because news travelled slow. Early one morning, Jake Weir went to town to see about a mixture of grains for his horses. When he returned to his farm and went into the house, he saw a stranger sitting at his table.